DESIRE, CREATE, INHABIT!

There are exhibits that invite you to explore a space, and there are others that build one. Last Summer's Love does the latter: more than an exhibition, it is a spell. With the curation of Camila Orozco Demonte, Sebastián Pannucci, and Debra Pereiro Wuiovich, twelve artists delve into the fabric of their desires and traumas, raising personal altars that function as amulets or postcards from another time. The exhibit is an echo of the things that commit us to the world, of those intimate gestures that materialize in objects. Those small private fictions that, when shared, reveal something of the collective memory.

The space of Gachi Prieto becomes a collage of materials and narratives. There is Federico Kirschbaum, with his woven crystal landscape, a tapestry of light where each reflection vibrates with the insistence of someone trying to capture the fleeting moment. Dominique Vispo, on the other hand, takes the vitreaux, that classic device of the sacred, and increases the voltage: her glass pieces intervened with cyanotype and nails remind us that every image contains a hidden edge.

At the other end of the spectrum, Fernando Méndez Colman transforms dreams into fertile ground for the strange: Botanical Parasomnia is a mutant pillow, a garden of cushioned textures that trap the insomniac along with their nocturnal specters. The textile also appears in Lucía Massolo, with her hand-sewn book. Franco Menacho manipulates the trophy object with an aesthetic that borders on kitsch but with the gravity of the symbolic. In all cases, the materials tell a story.

There is something in the exhibit that sounds like a farewell, not only because it is the closing cycle of the artists and curators at PAC, but because the works seem to pulse between what is retained and what is let go. Verónica Torgovnick paints tides, but also memory: layers of acrylic and gesso that function as a visual archive of an internal swell. Luciana Aldegani proposes a sonorous sea, an installation where the aquatic is more evocation than image. Marina Peralta Ramos, meanwhile, plays with the idea of direct memory: her installation Memory of Mar del Plata reconfigures the objects of a summer encapsulated in time and space.

There is a common pulse among these works: the desire to fix the elusive, to translate into matter something that decomposes at the very moment we look at it.

The captivating gleam of the surface is a deception: beneath lies a bittersweet secret. Last Summer's Love reminds us that beauty also hurts, that rituals build us but also sustain us in fragility. Each work is a miniature fable about the desire for permanence, about the desperate attempt to anchor a feeling in an object. But like all summer love, there is also an implicit goodbye.

In this final act, the exhibit becomes a manifesto on memory and autofiction. It is not only about what we look at, but about what we choose to remember.